The Royal Society of Literature Announces Digital 'Dalloway Day' 2021

The Royal Society of Literature, the voice for the value of literature in the UK, has today unveiled plans for Dalloway Day 2021. Every year on 'a Wednesday in mid-June', the society celebrates the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf. On Wednesday 16 June, their second virtual Dalloway Day will feature online panel discussions, a writing workshop, a podcast, and self-guided walking tours of Bloomsbury. This full-day programme celebrates 100 years since Woolf's only short story collection, Monday or Tuesday, was published and interrogates female friendship, and Woolf's evergreen influence on literary, and material, landscapes. Audiences can register at https://rsliterature.org/rsl-event/dalloway-day-2021/.

Introducing Virginia Woolf - a workshop with Kabe Wilson

Multimedia Artist and Woolf scholar Kabe Wilson will deliver an introductory session on Virginia Woolf to students of Mulberry School Trust. This session will include a lecture and a writing workshop on Woolf's own inspirations, writers who were inspired by Woolf, and how we can creatively interact with classic texts in a modern context.

Kabe Wilson is a British multimedia artist with a particular interest in adaptation across different forms. His work on Virginia Woolf includes 'The Dreadlock Hoax', a performance piece that adapted and inverted the infamous Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, Olivia N'Gowfri - Of One Woman or So, an extended experiment in literary recycling, and more recently 'On Being Still', a series of paintings and writings that scrutinises his own engagement with the Bloomsbury Group within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter.

Exploring Bloomsbury with Susheila Nasta, Romesh Gunsekera and Alexander Bubb.

After a year in which walks through our neighbourhoods have been our sanctuary, the RSL have curated a digital audiotour exploring the incredible influence of South Asians on Bloomsbury. Curated and narrated by Susheila Nasta, Romesh Gunsekera with Alexander Bubb, the tour is integrated into the map of Bloomsbury, as well as available as a playlist on the RSL's Soundcloud. Listeners can follow along using the interactive map. The map and tour are available to enjoy from home, or as a self-guided walking tour through the home neighbourhoods of the Bloomsbury Group.

As part of Dalloway Day 2021, the RSL is also relaunching 'There We Stop; There We Stand', an interactive map and audio walking tour from artist S. I. Martin - author, artist and founder 500 Years of Black London walks - which explores the compelling Black cultural heritage of Soho, by touching on the lives of those whose portraits hang in the National Portrait Gallery, in the footsteps of Clarissa Dalloway. S. I. Martin's narration is integrated throughout the map, as well as available as a playlist on the RSL's Soundcloud. Listeners can follow along using the interactive map.

Lit Hub Podcast: Deborah Levy and Merve Emre on Virginia Woolf

In a conversation hosted by US site Literary Hub, Deborah Levy and Merve Emre discuss what Virginia Woolf means to them and the enduring influence of her work upon their own writing.

Deborah Levy FRSL is the author of seven novels: Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatizations of Freud's iconic case studies, Dora and The Wolfman. She is also the author of a formally innovative and emotionally daring trilogy of memoirs, a living autobiography on writing, gender politics and philosophy, the final volume of which, Real Estate, was published in May 2021.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway.

Corrine Segal is an editor with extensive journalism experience currently helping writers develop narrative nonfiction, longform essays, and news features at Literary Hub, where she is a senior editor. Corrine was the lead online editor for PBS NewsHour's weekend program, managing our daily news coverage on the weekends while reporting on justice movements and culture. Her work has appeared on PBS NewsHour's show and website and in Literary Hub, the New York Observer, and Boston Review.

Material Culture in a Digital World

Join the RSL to interrogate how our ideas about material culture have changed, in the 100 years since Clarissa Dalloway walked the streets of London with best-selling author and Fellow of the RSL Kate Mosse, Claire Wilcox, Professor in Fashion Curation and Senior Curator of Fashion at the V&A, and Shahidha Bari, Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories, and presenter of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking.

In 1925, Virginia Woolf coined the phrase 'frock consciousness'; in 2021 many of us are considering whether we will ever again don a pair of high-heeled shoes. In this discussion of experts across fashion, fiction and curation, the RSL explore how clothes shape our lives, the importance of fashion to fiction in creating worlds, and how material culture lives on in a digital world.

Kate Mosse was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.Kate Mosse OBE is an award-winning, bestselling novelist, playwright & nonfiction writer. Historical novels include the Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel), The Burning Chambers and The City of Tears. Her Gothic fiction includes The Taxidermist's Daughter, The Winter Ghosts and The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales. Her books have been translated into 37 languages and published in more than 40 countries. Kate is a Visiting Professor in Contemporary Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and is the Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Claire Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She received an honorary doctorate in art and design from Middlesex University in July 2017. She sits on the editorial board of the journal Fashion Theory. She is professor of fashion curation at the London College of Fashion.

Shadiha Bari is a Professor at the University of the Arts London, the writer of "Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes" and a Presenter of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking, known as the Arts and Ideas podcast.

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield: Critical Friendship

'We have got the same job, Virginia, and it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing.' Katherine Mansfield

Join the RSL as they unspool the relationship between two of modernism's most significant writers, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Although their friendship was brief - from 1917 until Mansfield's death in 1923 - its effect on their work was profound. Despite scathing critiques of each other's work, and many disagreements, the bond between Woolf and Mansfield was marked by mutual appreciation; upon Mansfield's death, Woolf wrote 'I was jealous of her writing - the only writing I have ever been jealous of.'

Marking 100 years since the publication of Woolf's only short story collection Monday or Tuesday, writers Kirsty Gunn, Emily Midorikawa, Irenosen Okojie and Emma Claire Sweeney will consider the short stories of Mansfield and Woolf, and the unique tensions of personal and professional friendship.

Kirsty Gunn was elected as a Fellow of the RSL in 2020. She is the author of nine works of fiction including, most recently Caroline's Bikini, and a forthcoming collection of short stories, Blood Knowledge. Her work has been translated in over 12 countries, received international awards, and been made into films, dance and radio productions.

Emily Midorikawa is the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice. She co-authored (with Emma Claire Sweeney) A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontё, Eliot and Woolf. Emily won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and has written for the Telegraph, the Paris Review and the Washington Post.

Irenosen Okojie was elected as a Fellow of the RSL in 2018. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, won a Betty Trask Award. Her short stories have been published internationally, and her collection Speak Gigantular was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Saboteur Awards, and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award.

Emma Claire Sweeney has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and has been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri and Fish. She teaches creative writing at New York University; co-runs SomethingRhymed.com, and writes on disability for the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday.

This is an online event hosted on the British Library platform. Bookers are sent a link in advance giving access and can watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time.

WRITE & SHINE: Blue & Green

Led by writer Gemma Seltzer, this specially commissioned Write & Shine workshop will focus on the short story, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Virginia Woolf's collection, Monday or Tuesday.

The workshop will take inspiration from Virginia Woolf's story of the same name, Blue & Green, celebrating these two colours through surreal images and associations. In this workshop, the audience will be guided through writing prompts to explore the role of colour in our creative work, its relationship to place, and how to work with inspiration from the past. Write & Shine morning writing workshops are open to all levels of experience.

Gemma Seltzer, a short story writer and experienced literary facilitator, founded Write & Shine in 2015.

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